‘Visages Villages: documenting creative collaboration’

ABSTRACT Visages Villages (2017), co-directed by Agnès Varda and photographer JR, is a performative, poetic documentary structured around the pair’s creation of portraits of ordinary people in the far-flung villages of rural France. This essay examines the links between Visages Villages and Varda’s documentary practice as a whole. The film extends Varda’s longstanding preoccupation with the power of place, documenting the filmmakers’ travels and their establishment of connections with people they meet on the road. The specificity of Visages Villages resides in its weaving together of the key motifs of vision and the vagaries of friendship, resulting in a series of staged and spontaneous encounters that raise questions about the function of art and the nature of collaboration.